Enterprises are typically completely dependent on technology. Therefore, any uncertainty related to this technology is potentially disastrous to the company's business. This uncertainty comes in many forms and is based on the idea of the control and delivery of regular and dependable connectivity, i.e., no disruption to service. This uncertainty includes information technology (IT) elements such as networking outages or any service disruption, data unavailability, and security breaches brought about by viruses and other attacks.
The number one issue facing IT Managers today is deciding on when to build the next data center. Expansion is typically straightforward but expensive. Thus, expansion is to be avoided if possible.
In this marriage of the core enterprise business and the technology which runs it, uncertainty also includes overhead and costs. The more all of these elements are introduced into the ecosystem, the more uncertainty occurs, and the more IT is needed to maintain in the future (in terms of money, people, and vendors). This economic description is often misunderstood as simple “extra costs” to be managed by re-arranging older solutions, re-utilizing hardware, outsourcing, or downsizing, when it is actually serious overhead related to uncertainty and control that drains the business's bottom line. This cost as a function of IT is represented in FIG. 1.
Programming (i.e., Software), is a language used to convey ideas or concepts. This firmly establishes software as a form of communication, which adheres to Claude Shannon's “Mathematical Theory of Communications”. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 1948. This means that Software (and more broadly data), is a Message that is encoded and decoded through computers. Shannon stipulates that these machines must allow for the broadest set of messages; having no knowledge of the semantic details within. The direct relevance of the computer as a communications device (Licklider et al., “The Computer as a Communication Device,” 1969), and that the computations it produces are simply messages, means that switching operations are employed to support the need to share the underlying device. Such an approach was outlined by Bellman et al. in 1959. Bellman et al., “On an Application of Dynamic Programming to the Synthesis of Logical Systems,” 1959. This general model of computing is illustrated in FIG. 2. As shown in FIG. 2, input/output component 210 of computer 220 receives data such as software. Processor 205 of computer 220 decodes data 215 based on a programming language to produce computation 200.
Within an Organization's network of data centers there is frequently a need to share information. By sharing we mean the transfer of data from one application to another over the IP network. Today, information associated with this communication is limited to packet processing. Little to no information about the transfer of data from one application to another exists in any meaningful way.
The difference between information and data lies in the existence (or absence) of encoding. Historically, a data center was home to one (or possibly two) large data processing unit(s). There was relatively little information, primarily because the production of a computation was an expensive endeavor. As a result, there was relatively little sharing. If an application needed access to data it ran on the data center's host computer. Over the course of the last forty years, with each cycle of Moore's Law, there has been a relative reduction in this unit cost. And with this reduction has come a corresponding increase in information. This increase has resulted in a corresponding increase in sharing.
Accordingly, a need exists for a solution that provides a company with relatively less uncertainty with respect to information technology. A further need exists for such a solution that provides a company with relatively less control overhead. A further need exists for such a solution that provides improved information sharing between applications over an IP network. A further need exists for such a solution that provides improved efficiency of a data center's scale-out capacity.